7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Formation’s Journey in Revolutionizing Tech Education

Sometimes the best business insights come from running the worst possible version of your eventual business. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Sophie Novati shared how spending two years running a one-person coding bootcamp – while depleting her savings – laid the foundation for Formation’s innovative approach to technical education.

Here are the key go-to-market lessons from Formation’s journey:

1. Find Your Edge Through First-Hand Experience

Before Formation’s current success, Sophie spent two years in the trenches. “I was essentially running my own coding boot camp. It was just a complete one person show. I ran all of the recruiting, all of the instruction, I did all of the grading,” she recalls. This hands-on experience revealed a crucial insight: technical education programs weren’t applying engineering principles to education itself.

2. Turn Market Constraints into Product Innovation

Instead of following the traditional model of fixed curricula, Formation built a dynamic system where “every lesson, every class, every assignment that every student does is dynamically computed by our technology based on each person’s performance in the program.” This approach transformed education’s inherent scaling challenges into a technological advantage.

3. Build Unlimited Value into Your Core Offering

Formation’s key differentiator is their commitment to unlimited support. While competitors offer fixed-term programs with basic follow-up, Formation provides continuous technical training until students secure jobs. As Sophie explains, “Most training programs, they have a fixed schedule… Even when they say, we support you unconditionally, or until you have a signed offer letter, that oftentimes looks like just a call with a career coach every so often.”

4. Evolve Your Business Model Through Market Feedback

Formation’s journey from direct-to-consumer to enterprise partnerships shows the importance of staying responsive to market opportunities. “Most recently, we just launched a partnership with Netflix as part of their diversity hiring initiatives,” Sophie shares, demonstrating how their platform can support corporate diversity goals at scale.

5. Take the High Road in Community Management

When faced with online criticism and competitor manipulation on platforms like Reddit, Formation chose authenticity over quick wins. Sophie notes, “We’ve constantly been very middle of the road neutral in terms of our stances, applauding our competitors in ways that they are doing things well and fairly firmly pointing out areas in which they are not doing a good enough job.”

6. Adapt Your Support Model to Market Conditions

Formation’s response to the tech downturn demonstrates the importance of evolving with market conditions. “We’re in a market right now where people just need to be a lot more prepared for the interview process,” Sophie observes. Rather than simply acknowledging longer job searches, they intensified their support model to match the new reality.

7. Think Beyond Current Scale

While currently serving 400 active learners, Formation’s vision extends much further. “We’re not just thinking about building the highest quality education possible, which, of course, we’re doing, but we’re also thinking about building it in a scalable way such that we can offer it to as many people in the world as possible,” Sophie explains. This long-term thinking shapes their current product decisions and go-to-market strategy.

The results validate this approach: Formation’s students saw an average compensation increase of $100,000 in 2022. But perhaps more importantly, their journey offers valuable lessons for founders building businesses that require personalization at scale.

For technical founders, Formation’s story illustrates how applying engineering principles to traditionally non-technical sectors can create powerful differentiation. By focusing on scalability through technology rather than through traditional methods, Formation has created a model that becomes more effective as it grows – a key insight for any founder looking to build a sustainable competitive advantage.